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2014: I’ve got two new social media pieces in the works right now, one a serious, business-reader audience focus think piece on how to filter what your public relations/social media “expert” people are trying to feed you and one a more candid and personal look at how social media experts are ruining my experience of social media–probably for here, for the fall. In the interm, Nothing By The Bookcontinues its old school un-social media-style rerun summer,please enjoy this oldie, originally published in May 2013.

I’ve been filling an unusual role the last few days: holder of the Facebook password for a friend who needed a bit of a detox/distance from the social media platform… but neither want to complete total Facebook seppuku nor felt she had the self-discipline required to just stay off—if she knew she could go on.

I give her access back today, and we’ll debrief afterwards to see what she learned from the experience… if anything. Thus far, all she’s learned is that I’m a “fucking hard-ass bitch,” who won’t give her access early, no matter how much she joneses for it. Ha. I’m mildly shocked she didn’t know that about me before. But. The experiment wasn’t supposed to be about the strength of our relationship—I’m pretty much it will survive the name-calling of the last few days—but about her bumpy relationship with Facebook.

Ironically, as my friend has been struggling to figure out how to make that relationship functional, I’ve been crafting a post about how much I love Facebook. Because I really do. And it massively ticks me off when people dis it—and the social connections people make, have, and preserve on it. It particularly ticks me off when people are contemptuous about how stay-at-home moms and parents of young children use Facebook—and how much time they spend on Facebook.

Time that the detractors believe would be more productively spent—oh, any other way. Cleaning, cooking. Hyper-focused on the children. Knitting. Reading. Canning. Blogging? Maybe not so much blogging…

Now, I won’t deny that some folks run into trouble with the role social media in general, and Facebook in particular, plays in their lives. Others have documented that up the wazoo; my friend’s recent decision to detox is a specific example from my own bubble.

But I find it quite disturbing that much of the dialogue and criticism around mothers and women on Facebook—in the blog world—in social media and cyber-space generally—has this undercurrent:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t talk to others.

It’s there. Ponder it the next time some expert, Luddite or just run-of-the-mill jack ass takes you—or someone else—to task for Facebooking, texting, tweeting or blogging.

This, really is the subtext, almost always:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

Oh, they might fake it by saying “Instead of Facebooking, foster real life relationships.” They don’t mean it.

See, they—you know who ‘they’ are, right? ‘They’; it’s always ‘them’ who do this sort of stuff—have always done this to women, to mothers.

Before Facebook et al.—they took exception to the amount of time women spent on the telephone. Flip through any cartoon collection from the 1940s-1980s, and you’ll see images of women gabbing on the telephone—wasting time—neglecting their duties.

Before the telephone… women wrote too many letters. ‘tis true. The novels of the 18th and 19th century—many of them epistolary novels, which is such a beautiful irony—are filled with slags at lady letter writers. Even my beloved Jane Austen, letter writer extraordinaire, engages in this slag-fest (I hope, unconsciously), mocking Lady Bertram’s letters in Mansfield Park even as she describes what a critical lifeline to the people she loves these letters are for Portsmouth-stuck Fanny Price.

Before letters—gossiping in the town square, the market. Getting together to wash clothes in the river—and talking, sharing. Talking while gathering nuts, roots, berries together.

‘They’ have always come down on women talking. Sharing. Communicating.

Think about it.

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

A medium without its problems it isn’t, for sure. And because it’s so new—as is so much that we have deal with these days in the communication world—many people will struggle with it, abuse it, suffer as a result. And we have to figure out how to control it and make it work for us, instead of having it control us and make us miserable.

And we ought to be critical of it, absolutely, if we think its effect on our lives and the lives of those we love is negative.

But for me, as the primary care giver for my children and someone who works from home, Facebook is, very often, a critical antidote to this:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

It keeps me connected to people I love who are in different cities, different countries, different continents.

It continues to nurture important friendships when people get busy, get into incompatible phases that make getting together difficult.

It lets me answer an SOS when a friend needs—a meal delivered, a child chauffeured, a pair of size 7 rain boots. Or, just a brief sanity break or a cyber-hug.

It lets me send out an SOS when I’m out of eggs, milk or salt, and stuck at home with a sick toddler. Invariably, there’s neighbour who’s en route to the grocery store who can help.

It means I get to see and share my nephews and nieces’ milestones as soon as they happen.

It allows me to get a hit of sociability when circumstances force me to, physically, be trapped at home alone.

It helps me build community.

It helps me break isolation—be connected. It’s a tool. It’s powerful.

It helps me ask for help when I need it. Be it a real, physical “do this for me” need–or a more intangible “I’m going crazy here and I need to vent!” kind of crisis.

And it ticks me off when ‘they’ dis it—because I think they dis it because they want me—us, women, mothers, parents—to be alone. Isolated. Disconnected.

They always do that, you know. They always have.

Don’t let them.

I’m tempted to end with a list of 10 ways to make Facebook (and social media generally) be a positive and not soul-sucking experience. But I’m sure scores of these already exist out there. So let’s just end on this note:

I supported my friend during her detox by staying off Facebook, Twitter and Gmail and Google+ through the long weekend, so I have no idea what cool and fascinating things the blogosphere put forth this weekend. But I’d like to introduce you to my blogging friend Deb at the Urban Moo Cow (awesome blog name, awesome mama, awesome writer) whose last post, The Asshole Brigade Coming Soon, is sort of about building community. The challenges of building and maintaining community. Anyway, that’s the spin I’m putting on it to make it fit with my Facebook rant.

P.S. Was it hard staying off social media for a mere 72 hours? Yes and no. No pain, no shakes, no jonesing… but it made a few things harder. Had to walk around the neighbourhood looking for someone for the three-year-old to play with on Sunday, with not much success, instead of posting a Facebook SOS/play invite… Couldn’t invite random people to share a meal with us Monday night… couldn’t share this awesome link from BrainPickings.org on Good Writing versus Talented Writing even though I really wanted to… didn’t find out that my neighbour had a washing machine meltdown and needed to use someone else’s washing machine in time to help her… and I’m sure there’s a new puking cat video out there that I need to see to make my life complete.

So here’s how it happened: I’m sitting on our beautiful unflooded Common* with some of my favourite people and wine is flowing and the fire is crackling and we’re talking about all the signs of “normal” that are returning to our lives: the police stopping speeders, peace officers handing out parking tickets, citizens complaining about “the City,” neighbours starting to rag on each other… And I start expounding, aided by the freely flowing wine, about how that’s THE thing about community that people just don’t get. That it’s messy and conflict-ridden and hard and…

… and I blather on, because this is a huge horse of mine in these post-flood days, and as I say, “And community IS full of assholes and parasites… and bitches and mean girls and…”—at that precise moment, I see the essay and I fall in love with it. Oh, yes. Community, such a fuzzy-wuzzy warm word, rose-coloured glasses and hugs and smiles and planting flowers and front porches and granola-making organic-gardening hippies—oh, yes. And the punchline of the piece—I love it, I feel my toes curl in anticipation of how I’m going to lead up to it—the punchline is going to be, “Community is full of assholes, bitches and mean girls. And parasites.” And I’m going to repeat it a couple of times in the piece, like a chorus, and I’m going to build it around the YYC Attachment Parenting Village, because oh-yes-oh-yes-the-contrast—the immediate association of baby-wearing-co-sleeping-gentle-discipline-mamas and the bitches and mean girls line, oh-yes…

So I write it, first in my head, and then on-line, and I touch a raw nerve, of course, but…

Fuck.

Not quite the one I intended.

Now, that doesn’t happen to me very often—because I am an extremely effective manipulator of feelings and reactions when I write, even on those rare occasions when I so fall in love with a phrase or a sentence that I build everything around that. But. Here, I own my failure. Clearly, if I feel so many of you—not so much those of you publicly commenting on the post on my blog, but those of you dissecting it in other fora and in particular those of you sending me emotive private messages about it—missed its key point, I’ve failed as a writer.

“Yo, Jane, first visit here. What the hell are you yammering on about?”

So. I own my failure. Should have refined, revised. But. I think my failure is also part of this attachment to a utopian vision of community so many people buy into. D’you know what I mean? When I say tribe, community, you don’t think bitches, mean girls, assholes and parasites, do you? No. You think perfection, utopia, eternal friendship, unconditional love, and warm bowls of soup… and when you talk about building your tribe, finding your tribe you seek perfection and utopia—or at least a hell of a lot more of that than I do. And beloved, when you seek perfection in community, it will always, always, always disappoint you.

And I really, really, really want you to have a tribe. So I am now going to pick up a sledge hammer and whack your brain with it, very bluntly, three times. Ready? Three points. Hear them. Understand them. Or die alone.

Here we go:

1. Community is not selfless.

Community, tribe does not equal charity. Or unconditional help and support. Or love, peace and eternal grooviness. And, so, you see, community is not selfless. It does not act selflessly as an entity, nor do its members act selflessly as individuals. You get out of community what you put into it. But not in the way you think.

I’m not talking about quid-pro-quo/I scratch-your-back-your-scratch-mine kind of thing here. That, beloved, is called reciprocal altruism, and it’s an essential part of most social relationships. Social transactions in a community are more complex, and they work like this. Patty’s really sick, and so Anne watches her kids for weeks and Sarah pops in every few days with groceries. When Anne’s marriage starts to implode, Lucy steps in to watch her kids so Anne and her partner can go to counselling sessions. Sarah calls Anne every few days to check in on her. When Sarah has a new baby, Karen sets up a meal train for her… And so it goes.

That’s how community works. It’s a collection of bonds. See? That’s how you get out of a community what you put into it. Not necessarily—in fact, rarely—from the person you give it to.

Now… Sarah is not feeding Patty and checking in on Anne because she’s anticipating payback down the line when she needs it, of course not. She does all that because she’s just a good person, right? A good friend. She loves Patty. She wants to help Anne. But each of those acts builds her social capital. And when she needs it, the community will give it back to her. Patty may not help her out, because maybe when Sarah’s in need, Patty’s life will still be a mess. But someone will. Guaranteed. Because Sarah’s part of a community in which she’s invested.

But that community, it’s not selfless. Not at all. It only carries its parasites for a while. If Patty just keeps on collecting and never gives back—she starts getting less and less. And funny thing: it’s rarely a conscious, explicit decision. It’s not that the community gets together and says, “Patty’s a parasite and we’re done with her.” It’s more subtle. People notice, as individuals. And, as individuals, choose to send their energy and help elsewhere.

So, beloved. Don’t be a parasite. Give, contribute, build, help. When you can. Because you never know when life will force you to collect.

Reader freak-out: Are you calling me a parasite?

Jane: Maybe. Are you?

2. Community is supposed to ostracize.

Holy fuck, did you hear that? That was a thousand jaws dropping, rose-coloured glasses smashing into little pieces. And gentle readers unsubscribing en masse. But yes, beloved. You do not include without excluding. You do not define what something, some circle is without leaving someone outside it. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ALL-INCLUSIVE COMMUNITY. Every community, as it defines itself, defines who it includes within its circle and who it places outside them. Every community has rules. Articulated rules. And unspoken rules. And it punishes the members who break them.

Once, someone asked me to write up a piece on their little sub-community, and she wanted the dominant image to be “a diverse group of like-minded people.” Ha. You can be a tribe/community that values diversity up-the-wazoo—there will still be some type-a-thing you’ll exclude. Want to run a puppy mill in Sunnyhill? Get the fuck out. Not gonna happen. Crackhouse next door? No. Not part of what I want my diverse community to be, sorry. Joining an AP support group and looking for validation of your choice to sleep train your three-month old? Sorry. Wrong forum. A Richard Dawkins-loving atheist looking for affirmation in a creationist book club? Why the hell would you do that to yourself?

Community excludes and ostracizes. Rejects as well as embraces. That’s part of what it does.

Jane: No, I’m not. More on that in a future post. In the meantime, read the above paragraph again. Think about your tribes, communities and what defines them. What makes them what they are? Do their definitions truly exclude NO ONE? Really? Because I can give you a list of six people immediately that you would want to exclude out of your community, no matter how inclusive you claim it is. Community excludes. There’s no getting around that.

It totally sucks to be on the receiving end of that. Totally. Which brings us to sledge hammer point three:

3. It’s okay to leave.

We live in a really amazing, unprecedented world right now. For the first time ever, many of us get to choose our tribe, our community. We’re not stuck with the one we’re born into. We can work to change our community… or we can choose to leave. Find a new one. Start a new one.

This is an amazing, awesome and absolutely revolutionary idea. And it’s not true for all of humanity, and certainly not all of North Americans. But it’s true for me. All of my tribes, bar my extended family, are tribes of my choosing and creating. And I know it’s true for many of you. If you’re privileged enough to have access to the Internet and free time enough to surf and blog, you’re free enough to choose your tribe(s), your communities.

So. You can choose. You can leave.

As a new mother, I went through three different playgroups before I found one in which there was enough commonality between myself and the other women that I chose to stay and get to know them. As an adult looking for a “home,” I had two horrible misfires before finding my piece of beloved flood plane. As a fledging homeschooler, I’ve lost count of the number of on-line fora I’ve stumbled through before finding a couple that worked for me for a while… and then, decided to leave all those and start another that did what I needed such a forum to do… and no more.

You can choose. You can leave.

But… community is messy. And it takes time. And every, every, EVERY community has its assholes, bitches, mean girls, and parasites. So if you’re leaving all the time—if every time you encounter a community’s wart, conflict, friction, pain or dark side, you immediately run… oh, beloved. You will die alone and unhappy.

You will never find a tribe that works for you, my serial communist. Because… messy. Hard.

Worth it.

Reader freak out: Did you just call me a communist?

Jane: A serial communist, no less. What? You’ve got a problem with that?

xoxo

“Jane”

* What is this Common about which you keep blathering? The common green space onto which many of the units at our housing co-op back onto. My extended backyard. My world. The reason I can raise and homeschool three children in 1000 square feet of badly designed space. Where I meet my neighbours and entertain my friends. The most important physical space in my life. Do you have a Common? Get one. Make one. Turn your backyard into one by inviting friends over to hang and drop in—all the time. Take over a public park with friends—preferably at the same time each week, each day. Spread the word. That piece of green space in your neighbourhood no one uses it? Make it your own. Make it your Common. Community needs common spaces, and it needs them to be used. Loved.

My favourite friends in cyber-space are all mildly (or not so mildly) anti-social introverts. Not that different from my most beloved in-real-life friends. “I don’t think we set out to be misanthropes,” one told me a little while ago. “It’s just that there are so many idiots out there.” “It’s not that I hate most people,” another told me, without a hint of defensiveness, and really, without that much wine consumption in evidence. “I just don’t have enough time or energy to deal with their stupid shit.”

“Jesus,” my beloved partner said, listening in on the latter conversation. “Are you ever lucky you found each other. And also kind of amazing. How did you ever manage to become friends, actually? I mean, the first time you met, did you just glower at each other across the room in mutual hatred?”

Oh, lover, I’m so glad you asked. Not mutual hatred, exactly, but… see, the story of our introverted, mildly dysfunctional “come over for a playdate, but don’t expect me to talk to you the whole time you’re here, okay, cause I’m not really into that” friendship is actually a story of how you successfully build community.

Its central thesis is, really, that you don’t need to love thy neighbour to build community. To have a tribe. The gods know I don’t, and the tribe I have, baby―each of you should covet.

But I’m telling the story all wrong. Backwards. I think the story starts in 2002, when my son was born while all of my university-era friends were either childless, single or both. Plus, most of them were no longer living in the city I moved back to. You can tell where that plot line is going? New mother. Alone. Alienated. Whatever will she do?

She’s going to build a tribe. And I did. So, skip ahead with me 11 years, to YYC’s epic flood, and meet them.

I’d introduce you to each personally, but as you can see, there are fucking hundreds of them, and, honestly, I don’t even know most of their names. See that woman, over there, with a baby strapped to her back, pulling another kid and a cooler in a wagon? She came to save me on a Wednesday night when I was having a total breakdown and couldn’t cope with the idea of cleaning one more thing, putting one more thing away―making one more decision. And then offered me her house as a sanctuary to stay in for the upcoming few days, if things were getting too crowded at my parents house, where we were evacuated.

I had never met her before. Ever.

She showed up that Wednesday, because another woman texted her to let her know I needed help, now. I had never met that woman until Monday.

I met a dozen, more, of them for the first time that Monday, when they answered my call for help for my physical community, my beloved Sunnyhill. They came―to wield crowbars, shovels, buckets, wheelbarrows. To watch children. To pick up filthy, barely-salvageable clothes to wash. To bring food. To drop off their husbands:

“He’s a carpenter. He’ll be great at deconstruction. And make sure you call us when you’re ready to rebuild.”

“He’s got lots of experience in flood restoration. Use him!”

“He’s really annoying, but very strong.” (Ha, ha, ha. No, really, she really did say that. But why-ever would you immediately think I was talking about you?)

“He’s coming with our generator, pumps, fans, and pick-up truck. What else do you need?”

They came to do the hundred things that needed to be done. Later, when things calmed down, I saw on on-line fora how they were berating themselves that they didn’t do more, feeling guilty that they didn’t do enough. Jesus Christ. They fed us, watched our kids, cleaned our clothes, supplied us with pretty much everything we needed, from labour to bleach, de-moulder, and, at one point, two Bobcats (score!). The ones who couldn’t come or “do” kept the lines of communication flowing, monitoring Facebook, Twitter, texts and e-mail. I’d shout out on-line “We needed razor-blade scrapers, because that goddamn lino is not coming out!” and someone would arrive wielding one. Ditto face masks, work gloves, shovels, bleach, bleach, bleach, shop vacs, fans―everything and anything.

More? They totally and completely saved us. What more could they have done?

They even brought red wine and chocolate. (And beer. Copious amounts of beer.)

Here’s the first important take-away: I get how each individual might think she could have done more, but, see, as a community―they did everything that needed to be done. They saved us, all 41 of our flooded homes in Sunnyhill. (And then, they went on into other neighbourhoods…)

Here’s the second important take-away: this is WHY you need to get off your shy introverted ass and start building your tribe right now. Not because I’m predicting an epic natural disaster in your future.

But life throws tough times your way all the time. New baby. Sick child. Dying parent. Paralyzing illness. Job loss. Partner loss. Immense life complications. Emotional, physical pain. Getting through any of it, all of it, alone is impossible.

Your tribe gets you through it.

And you, my cynical cyber-friend, I see you rolling your eyes, and I see you want to say, “Fuck, chick, I have friends, you have friends, friends got our backs, I know this, what snake oil do you think you’re selling?”

This snake oil, friend: a tribe is not your friends. Friends are friends, and I know you’ve got them. A tribe―a community―is the people who are going to come help you when you need them even if they hate your fucking guts some―all―of the rest of the time.

No, really. Stay with me here, because this is what you need to know, to understand, to find your tribe and to build it. See, my beloved lonely heart, if you’ve been on the parenting or life journey for a while and you feel you’re walking it alone most of the time, you’re looking for the wrong thing. You say you’re looking for a tribe, community, connection.

It’s full of assholes, bitches, mean girls and parasites. People who piss you off. People who take advantage of “the system,” whatever it is. People you dislike, and who dislike you right back. Community is messy: full of fights and hurt feelings and misunderstandings. Community is really, really―REALLY―hard work.

That’s your third take-away, baby: warts. Messy. Hard. A pain in the ass sometimes. Being part of a community is NOT being part of a circle of people just like you. (I’m not sure, but I think that might actually be the definition of a cult.)

Community includes people you don’t like. And also people you’ve never met, or will only meet in times of their great need―or yours.

Back to the end of the story: so these hero women ripping out drywall, insulation, floors and stairs in Sunnyhill, feeding us and our volunteers, running errands, and otherwise saving us? They were connected, in the main, by the attachment parenting community in Calgary. Which―to jump back to the beginning of my story―I found when, as a new mother, I was looking for other mothers, connections.

I think, back then, much like you, my lonely heart friend, I may have been looking for perfection. Because it took me a long, long time―years―to build the connections that, a few weeks ago, saved my home and my neighbourhood.

But here’s your fourth take away: building a tribe, community takes time. Years. You’re not going to find it the first day you stumble into a playground. The first time you share a meal. The first time you meet a group of other new parents at a zoo or park get-together. (Although, the first time you rip out a flooded-and-rotting-about-to-collapse-upon-your-heads shed together, you might well be buds for life.)

Building community takes years.

Especially if you’re the same sort of misanthrope with severe intimacy issues as I am.

Ready for the fifth one? You’ll love it, beloved introvert. The current main forum for the attachment parenting mamas in YYC has more than 600 members. That, beloved, is my definition of hell. Too crowded. Too many strangers. Too many fragile egos, too many unknowns for someone with my vaguely anti-social tendencies. I wasn’t even on the forum when these women decided to save Sunnyhill’s collective ass.

My connection to it was historic―and I was connected to people who were still active, who were connected to others, who were connected to others, who were connected to others, including three or four other families in Sunnyhill who at one time or another were active members of the community, who were connected to others, who were connected to…

See?

Community isn’t my bond to 600 people. Community is the entire collection of bonds. You know all those cliches: “United we stand!” “Strong together!”

Yeah. Cliches are cliches because they’re usually true.

That’s your fifth take-away: Community is the entire collection of bonds among the individuals who are part of it. Who touch it. And so you see, to build your tribe―you don’t need 600 or 60 BFFs. You invest and foster the handful of relationships that really feed you. You benefit, ultimately, from all the others―indirectly most of the time, very directly, come something like an epic flood. And you do contribute to all the others as well, indirectly most of the time, directly when they need you.

Well, unless you’re a total parasite.

But then, community supports some parasites too.

So if you’re still with me, lonely heart, I suspect you are currently in the grip of this thought:

“Woman, if that’s your cynical view of community, why the hell did all those people come to help you? Cause you sure don’t sound like Princess Community Sunshine.”

I’m not. And you should take heart: self-avowed misanthrope here. With severe intimacy issues, did I mention that? (Ask my next door neighbour sometime how long it took me to connect with her.) And I have a tribe everyone should covet. So if I got this amazing thing going for me―you can do it too.

And, this is so important: my “cynical” view of community is why I have community. Multiple, overlapping communities. See, because I don’t expect perfection―in fact, because I know community is a warty, messy, hard pain in the ass―I don’t run from it crying when my feelings get hurt, when people tick me off.

And, most important of all: they didn’t come to help me. See? They didn’t come because they loved me. They came because this is what a tribe does. What a community does: whatever needs to be done. It saves your ass when it has to. Not because it loves you, or owes you, personally. But because―it is something bigger than you and your handful of personal relationships.

So, beloved. If you’re on your life or parenting journey and you don’t have this tribe―you don’t have a community that you know is going to save you when disaster, depression, life strikes―get off your lazy introverted ass and start building it right now. You’ve got to. Alone, you will not make it.

And as you build, remember this:

A community is that group around you that does what needs to be done. That’s its definition. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Community is messy. Annoying. Full of assholes, bitches, mean girls and parasites. It’s worth it anyway.

Building community takes time. Years. Which is why you need to start NOW.

Finally: Community is the entire collection of bonds among the individuals who are part of it. It doesn’t mean having 6000, 600, 60 best friends. It doesn’t mean loving everyone within it.

It really just means recognizing that you are part of something greater, more important than yourself, your house, your nuclear family. And being part of it… in a way that works for you.

P.S. I chose to highlight the attachment parenting community of Calgary in this story both because of the sheer amount of physical and social labour its members committed to saving Sunnyhill and also for, frankly, story-telling effectiveness (writers manipulate. It’s what we’re paid to do. Keep that in mind every time you read an allegedly “objective” newspaper or magazine article). But there were multiple tribes saving Sunnyhill’s collective bohunkus as well as its individual homes. We were a community saved by a community of communities if you like. Among those of my own tribes that came to help us was the one I forged while at a university student paper―my former colleagues there came with spouses, friends, and members of their own other tribes. My entire extended family–my parents, brother and his wife, sister-in-law and her partner, my in-laws near and far… I tend to take their contribution to the disaster for granted, because, you know–family. That’s what they do. They save your ass, no questions asked. And my professional tribe too, editors I’ve both pleased and frustrated, interview subjects I’ve flattered and skewered, readers who’ve in the past sent me fan letters… and hate letters, too. I add this PS both to honour and thank them, and also, to reassure you with this: it is possible, that as you go along on the parenting journey, you don’t really connect with other people as parents. That you’ll never find a playgroup that results in meaningful connections.

“Fuck, Jane, this is how you reassure me? What’s wrong with you?”“Shut up and let me get to the point, will you?”

That doesn’t mean you give up on community. Find it elsewhere: in your professional life. In the arts community, or another passion. In politics (um… well, maybe). It’s out there. And it starts with one relationship.

I didn’t really panic until I hit the first police barricade and was told I couldn’t get into my neighbourhood. The police officer and I eyed each other through my window.

“We can’t let any more cars into Sunnyside,” he said.

“I need to go get my husband,” I said.

“And our dog!” Flora piped up.

“We can’t let any more cars into Sunnyside,” he repeated. Then looked at me again. Cut his eyes to the right.

He might as well have said, “But you know the area well, of course.”

I nodded.

Sharp turn right. How many other ways into Sunnyside? The main roads would be blocked off… but, yeah. Residential streets. Roundabouts. Alleys.

Text from Sean:

“Worst case scenario, park on McHugh’s Bluff. I’ll bike up the hill.”

It’s good to have a Plan C.

But Plan B worked: about 12 minutes later, after several not-entirely legal turns—one of them right in front of another police cruiser—I was in my driveway. The sky was blue, although the clouds south of the city were terrifying, and coming closer.

And I was home… and my neighbours were throwing things into their cars… and, yet, none of us really felt a particular sense of urgency, even though we got, at 5:45 p.m., the call to get out of our neighbourhood by 7 p.m.

See, our city’s two rivers, the Elbow and the Bow, get angry every once in a while. We get massive snow melt most years; every few years, they rip our riverbanks. And there was crazy flooding already south and west of the city—but… we were so sanguine. I mean, this is Calgary. One of Canada’s largest cities. Natural disasters don’t happen here.

Still. We’re responsible citizens.

“Are we going to flood?” Flora asked, in tears.

“No,” I said, firmly. “This is a precautionary evacuation. We’re just leaving so that the emergency crews don’t have to worry about us. Chill. Grab some books, your iPad—sleep-over at Grandma’s. No big deal.”

But. Those clouds. Disconcerting.

An hour later, with some clothes, computers, and Sean’s film equipment (our livelihood) in the truck, we were in evacuation traffic. But of course, right? What in a big city emergency doesn’t involve a traffic jam? Especially when you’re evacuating 100,000 people in a city of a million?

Texts from family and friends: “Are you guys high enough? Are you safe? Are you dry?”

Our response: “Evacuating. But safe. No worries.”

That was Thursday, June 20, 2013.

It was, honestly, kind of fun.

Ender’s commentary: “Does the river have a leak? Shouldn’t someone plug it?”

We laughed.

The rain that came down on us as we were navigating evacuation traffic and already flooded bridge and road closures to get to the safety of my parents’ house—providentially on very, very high ground—was a little scary.

But. You know. It was rain.

“Kind of an adventure, hey?” Cinder said. “Holy crap, look at that thunder!”

Kind of fun.

***

It stopped being fun in the morning when we saw what the rivers had done.

Our neighbourhood looked like this:

… and, by comparison, we got off easy.

If you want your heart torn to pieces, google “High River flood images” and see what the rivers have done to our neighbours in High River.

Not that Calgary was unscathed. The damage was… astounding. Our downtown core—the financial core, the business centre of one of Canada’s largest, richest cities—under water. Paralyzed. Some 100,000 of our people—out of their homes.

The rivers—gone mad. Still flowing, ripping.

It was, we found out, not just the worst flood ever in Canadian history, but the worst natural disaster in Canadian history.

“Well,” I told Sean—who’s from Manitoba, a Canadian province famed for its rampaging waters and regular floods, “when Calgary and Alberta do something, we do it all the way. Even natural disasters. Eat your heart out, Winnipeg! Our flood’s more epic than yours!”

And we laughed hysterically. Because, you know. If you don’t laugh…

We spent the first day after the flood doing what our amazing mayor, Naheed Nenshi, told us to do. Staying home. Staying off the roads. Letting the emergency crews do what they had to do.

It was the hardest thing ever.

You know how you watch the reactions of survivors of natural and other disasters on the news, and there’s all these people clamouring to go home, even though it’s dangerous and stupid?

I will never mock them again.

We wanted to go home.

We wanted to see home.

On Saturday—day two after the flood—we broke. We started calling and Facebooking and connecting with the people in Sunnyhill—our immediate community—and we met in a safe area… to plan? Compare notes? Cry? I’m not sure why we met. I think we needed to see that we were all ok.

And then… we broke orders. We didn’t mean to, you know. We were just going to stop on top of the McHugh Bluff to look.

But.

Home.

We walked down.

Thigh-high water in our street, spilling over sidewalks, lawns, and the adjacent Curling Club parking lot.

Water everywhere.

No way of getting “home.”

We looked.

The kids played on the playground—high and dry.

I let tears flow for the first time.

I don’t think the pictures really do it justice.

There was so much, so much water.

So much destruction.

It was overwhelming.

Our children—how resilient are children?—thought it was kind of cool. “Can we swim in it?” Cinder asked at one point. “Jesus Christ, no, it’s probably full of sewer water,” I choked out. They ran. Climbed trees…

Cinder took this photo of our Common area from the Tall Pine.

… and skipped rocks in the flood waters. Ender earned himself a cameo in one of the flood videos:

(That’s one of our neighbours kayaking through our Common. An experienced paddler, she was rescuing some of our people’s documents. You see, we didn’t really take that evac order that seriously. Some of us didn’t even take underwear, much less passports… The video is by Calgarian Bradley Stuckel and co.–did they not do a beautiful job? My filmmaker husband is uber-impressed.)

On Sunday (the flood waters came over Thursday/Friday night), Sean and I sold our children to friends, and, along with most of the flooded out Sunnysiders, waded into our neighbourhoods ahead of the all-clear from the city to see what the hell was going on with our houses.

It was, I’d like to say upfront, after seeing what we waded through, an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing to do.

But you see… it was home. We had to go see.

We reacted, all of us, in different ways to what we saw.

Sean went shopping for clean up and demolition supplies, and then to a community planning meeting.

I, unable to deal with the massive destruction on the ground floor, went up to our kitchen, and cleaned out the fridge—power, of course, was off, and had been since Thursday, and everything was rancid. And then cleaned, scrubbed the fridge. Because that, I could do.

And then…

And then, friends, my city’s people pulled off a miracle.

I think, in the future, the enormity of what the flood did to Calgary will be underplayed because of the rapidity with which the city stabilized and returned to some semblance of “normal” within a week.

We evacuated Thursday, June 20, 2013.

A week later, parts of our downtown were open for business.

The majority of the flooded houses in my neighbourhood had been ripped and disinfected: saved. All of the 41 (I said 38 in my earlier posts on calgarybusinesswriter.com: forgive me, numbers not a strong suit, ever) flooded units in my little sub-community of Sunnyhill were gutted, cleaned, bleached, demolded: saved. (Here’s my initial call for help to our friends, neighbours, and citizens; here’s the thank you and another thank you because one is just not enough—and here’s my take on why and how they performed this miracle.)

We lost, as a city, as a province, a mind-blowing amount of infrastructure. Roads. Bridges. Our beloved Zoo! Individual houses, and so many possessions (me: never buying anything. Ever again). But our response to this crisis, as a community, as individuals, has been amazing.

What grabs the headlines during so many other crises, and disasters? Looting. Riots. In Calgary, we had too many volunteers. And the Calgary Police Service wrote the citizens a thank you letter…

Our people opened their houses to evacuated relatives, friends and strangers. Started a laundry brigade for the evacuees. Fed displaced residents and the army of volunteers. Turned out in hordes to rip out basements, clean up debris, help any way they could.

(This isn’t my photo; it’s a FB/Twitter viral sensation–if you took it, tell me and I will happily credit you.)

Why our mayor is awesome and you should have nenvy too: “To all the people with the ‘Need Cute Firefighter’ signs in their windows’: We’re working on it,” he tweeted in response. And man, he delivered:

Ender wanted to pose with the cute firefighters. It was totally Ender. Not his mother. Really. Um. Moving on…

We have a crazy amount of work ahead of us, as individuals, as neighbourhoods, as communities—as a city and as a province.

Are we back to normal? Not quite. But we’re “back.” And we’re working on defining our new normal.

But after what YYC did in these last two weeks—we’re gonna get her done. No question about it. Because—we are Calgary. We acted as a community, to save our communities.

We are amazing.

You want to see more pictures of how amazing we are? Of course. Here are a few more:

I’ve been filling an unusual role the last few days: holder of the Facebook password for a friend who needed a bit of a detox/distance from the social media platform… but neither want to complete total Facebook seppuku nor felt she had the self-discipline required to just stay off—if she knew she could go on.

I give her access back today, and we’ll debrief afterwards to see what she learned from the experience… if anything. Thus far, all she’s learned is that I’m a “fucking hard-ass bitch,” who won’t give her access early, no matter how much she joneses for it. Ha. I’m mildly shocked she didn’t know that about me before. But. The experiment wasn’t supposed to be about the strength of our relationship—I’m pretty much it will survive the name-calling of the last few days—but about her bumpy relationship with Facebook.

Ironically, as my friend has been struggling to figure out how to make that relationship functional, I’ve been crafting a post about how much I love Facebook. Because I really do. And it massively ticks me off when people dis it—and the social connections people make, have, and preserve on it. It particularly ticks me off when people are contemptuous about how stay-at-home moms and parents of young children use Facebook—and how much time they spend on Facebook.

Time that the detractors believe would be more productively spent—oh, any other way. Cleaning, cooking. Hyper-focused on the children. Knitting. Reading. Canning. Blogging? Maybe not so much blogging…

Now, I won’t deny that some folks run into trouble with the role social media in general, and Facebook in particular, plays in their lives. Others have documented that up the wazoo; my friend’s recent decision to detox is a specific example from my own bubble.

But I find it quite disturbing that much of the dialogue and criticism around mothers and women on Facebook—in the blog world—in social media and cyber-space generally—has this undercurrent:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t talk to others.

It’s there. Ponder it the next time some expert, Luddite or just run-of-the-mill jack ass takes you—or someone else—to task for Facebooking, texting, tweeting or blogging.

This, really is the subtext, almost always:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

Oh, they might fake it by saying “Instead of Facebooking, foster real life relationships.” They don’t mean it.

See, they—you know who ‘they’ are, right? ‘They’; it’s always ‘them’ who do this sort of stuff—have always done this to women, to mothers.

Before Facebook et al.—they took exception to the amount of time women spent on the telephone. Flip through any cartoon collection from the 1940s-1980s, and you’ll see images of women gabbing on the telephone—wasting time—neglecting their duties.

Before the telephone… women wrote too many letters. ‘tis true. The novels of the 18th and 19th century—many of them epistolary novels, which is such a beautiful irony—are filled with slags at lady letter writers. Even my beloved Jane Austen, letter writer extraordinaire, engages in this slag-fest (I hope, unconsciously), mocking Lady Bertram’s letters in Mansfield Park even as she describes what a critical lifeline to the people she loves these letters are for Portsmouth-stuck Fanny Price.

Before letters—gossiping in the town square, the market. Getting together to wash clothes in the river—and talking, sharing. Talking while gathering nuts, roots, berries together.

‘They’ have always come down on women talking. Sharing. Communicating.

Think about it.

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

A medium without its problems it isn’t, for sure. And because it’s so new—as is so much that we have deal with these days in the communication world—many people will struggle with it, abuse it, suffer as a result. And we have to figure out how to control it and make it work for us, instead of having it control us and make us miserable.

And we ought to be critical of it, absolutely, if we think its effect on our lives and the lives of those we love is negative.

But for me, as the primary care giver for my children and someone who works from home, Facebook is, very often, a critical antidote to this:

Be alone. Be isolated. Don’t connect with others.

It keeps me connected to people I love who are in different cities, different countries, different continents.

It continues to nurture important friendships when people get busy, get into incompatible phases that make getting together difficult.

It lets me answer an SOS when a friend needs—a meal delivered, a child chauffeured, a pair of size 7 rain boots. Or, just a brief sanity break or a cyber-hug.

It lets me send out an SOS when I’m out of eggs, milk or salt, and stuck at home with a sick toddler. Invariably, there’s neighbour who’s en route to the grocery store who can help.

It means I get to see and share my nephews and nieces’ milestones as soon as they happen.

It allows me to get a hit of sociability when circumstances force me to, physically, be trapped at home alone.

It helps me build community.

It helps me break isolation—be connected. It’s a tool. It’s powerful.

It helps me ask for help when I need it. Be it a real, physical “do this for me” need–or a more intangible “I’m going crazy here and I need to vent!” kind of crisis.

And it ticks me off when ‘they’ dis it—because I think they dis it because they want me—us, women, mothers, parents—to be alone. Isolated. Disconnected.

They always do that, you know. They always have.

Don’t let them.

I’m tempted to end with a list of 10 ways to make Facebook (and social media generally) be a positive and not soul-sucking experience. But I’m sure scores of these already exist out there. So let’s just end on this note:

I supported my friend during her detox by staying off Facebook, Twitter and Gmail and Google+ through the long weekend, so I have no idea what cool and fascinating things the blogosphere put forth this weekend. But I’d like to introduce you to my blogging friend Deb at the Urban Moo Cow (awesome blog name, awesome mama, awesome writer) whose last post, The Asshole Brigade Coming Soon, is sort of about building community. The challenges of building and maintaining community. Anyway, that’s the spin I’m putting on it to make it fit with my Facebook rant.

P.S. Was it hard staying off social media for a mere 72 hours? Yes and no. No pain, no shakes, no jonesing… but it made a few things harder. Had to walk around the neighbourhood looking for someone for the three-year-old to play with on Sunday, with not much success, instead of posting a Facebook SOS/play invite… Couldn’t invite random people to share a meal with us Monday night… couldn’t share this awesome link from BrainPickings.org on Good Writing versus Talented Writing even though I really wanted to… didn’t find out that my neighbour had a washing machine meltdown and needed to use someone else’s washing machine in time to help her… and I’m sure there’s a new puking cat video out there that I need to see to make my life complete.